


Because of the Brave

by indigo25



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Minor Darcy Lewis/Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 02:25:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2605148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigo25/pseuds/indigo25
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He runs every day. His feet take him past memorials and monuments to the service men and women who served before and after him. One day he stops and meets three men.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Because of the Brave

“Our debt to the heroic men and valiant women in the service of our country can never be repaid. They have earned our undying gratitude. America will never forget their sacrifices.” -President Harry S Truman, World War II Memorial, Washington, D.C.

He’d gotten there just before dawn. His run around the city always looped him by the memorials and monuments before he wound his way back to his DuPont Circle apartment. Wasn’t anything planned on his part, just where his feet took him.  
Fifty six granite pillars rose up into the sky pinkening with daylight. They bore the names of the 48 states and eight U.S. territories and districts that sent men and women to fight in World War II.  
He’d run by the memorial dozens of times. He could run for hours and sometimes did to relieve the pressure building inside--the sadness.  
Sometimes he looked over as he passed.  
Sometimes he didn’t. He couldn’t.  
This day, he would stop.  
He’d been to the Korean War Memorial and stood for hours in shock and awe at the way the sculptor presented the faces of war. The look of tired men heading for the unknown ahead--the fear. These men would have been young men when he left for Europe. He might have served with a few of them if they’d stayed in the service.  
He’d run past the Washington D.C. World War I memorial one fine day not long after he’d arrived. He hadn’t known what he was looking at until he got closer. It saddened him to see the immaculate grass surrounding the weather-worn marble open-air structure. It appeared forgotten. Just like the war that claimed his father’s life. Another point of history we need not speak of, he thought.  
The sheer number of names on the wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial hit him like a gut punch. Some of them had volunteered to go, like he did. Others didn’t have any choice. Go fight and die for your country or go to jail. War wasn’t for everyone, he knew and understood that. But locking a man up because he doesn’t want to pick up a rifle is wrong. He also knew that calling a man a “baby killer” for going to some far off country at the order of a well-intentioned general with little to no knowledge of war or the Vietnamese people, also was wrong.  
But this memorial--monument was for him. For the men he’d seen live and for the others he’d seen die.  
This day, he would stop.  
He walked slowly around the monument, taking in the large iron wreaths on each of the pillars. If he looked to the west he’d see the Lincoln Memorial rising over the Reflecting Pool. To the east he’d see the Washington Monument, tall and solid.  
He stopped and stood for a moment before the pillar engraved “New York.” Blue eyes stared at the giant iron eagles perched in flight inside the arch marked “Atlantic.” He’d never had time to go to the Pacific Theater, though he had no doubt he and the Commandos would have ended up there if the Army had any say (hint: they did.)  
He counted the gold stars on the Freedom Wall, twice. The stars, 4,048 of them, represented 404,800 Americans who’d died. He wondered absently if he counted as one of them. His best friend did.  
“Here we mark the price of freedom,” it read.  
There were no names on the monument at Cadman Plaza Park, so thankfully he hadn’t had to see his own name and the name of his best friend listed among Brooklyn’s war dead.  
The sun was up and starting its ascent by the time he sat along the wall. His skin had already cooled in the Spring air from the run. He liked the lightweight fabric the new clothes used for that reason.  
“Awful early for a young man like yourself,” came a scratchy, paper-thin voice next to him. He turned.  
The man sat in a wheelchair and looked to be about 90. Maybe at one point he’d been a big man, but now he sat hunched over on himself. He wore a blue cap on his gray head with the words “U.S.S. Prometheus AR-3.” A Navy man.  
He wondered briefly how the sailor had gotten there but saw the middle aged blonde woman walking around the fountain and put it together that she’d likely pushed him over.  
“I’m an early riser,” he told him with a wry smile. “Did you serve?”  
The older man nodded. His green eyes lit up as he lifted a hand toward the south side of the fountain.  
“Crashed in Guadalcanal,” the sailor said. Steve let out a low whistle.  
He learned the man was from West Virginia and had been drafted into the Navy. He’d served on a supply and ammunition ship before being transferred to the Prometheus, a repair ship.  
“It was hot, all the time,” the sailor said. “You weren’t supposed to open the windows on the ship, but we did.”  
While neither theater sounded particularly better than the other, the sailor told him he preferred the stifling hot to the bitter cold he’d heard about from Europe. He was good with his hands, the sailor explained. He could fix “damned near anything” and worked in the machine shop aboard the Prometheus.  
Once they needed a repair man on one of the islands. The fix was easy enough for him, so he volunteered to go and offer his assistance. He’d been ferried over to a nearby aircraft carrier and was put aboard a two-seat fighter plane. The plan was to fly him to the island.  
“The coconut trees were coming up awful fast,” the sailor said with a smile and a rasping laugh. “First and last time I volunteered for anything.”  
The young man found himself laughing at that and shaking his head. He knew the feeling.  
“Try crashing in a plane made outta balsa wood dropped off the back of a perfectly good airplane with a working engine and tell me how you feel,” crowed a man approaching with a walker.  
A Chicago native, this man had served in the 82nd Airborne and immediately had the young man’s attention. He wore his wings on a ball cap with two bronze combat stars. Operation Overlord at Normandy and Operation Market Garden in Holland.  
“You a gliderman, sir?” the young man asked him. The older soldier gave him a proud nod.  
Glidermen were either the toughest, or dumbest, men in the airborne. It took guts to jump out of a perfectly good airplane with a parachute through gunfire but it was something else entirely to do so in a glider.  
The gliders were made out of lightweight materials, canvas along with metal tubing or a lightweight wood. The contraptions were towed behind C-47s and then released over the drop zone. Some carried 15 soldiers into battles and others, bigger gliders, carried as many as 34, squished in tight.  
Lots of them crashed. It wasn’t a wildly successful program, the Army only brought back about a dozen of them and promptly ended the program after the war.  
“Thing about the gliders was that they didn’t have a motor and they didn’t have any armor,” he explained. “They were really very flimsy but they did what they were supposed to do.  
“No place to go but down, so you had your glider pilot who would guide it down to the ground, hopefully in one piece.”  
The gliderman told them he and the others had to get out quick because they were an easy target for mortars.  
“A lot of them were destroyed in mortar attacks,” the soldier said.  
“That’s the craziest thing,” the sailor mused. “Its like paper airplanes. Who sends paper airplanes into battle where there’s flamethrowers and bombs? Americans.”  
“Damned straight,” the young man grinned.  
They were soon joined by another man, a captain who’d served in 142nd Infantry Regiment of the 36th Texas Division of the Texas National Guard. He’d walked up on his own steam and gave them all firm handshakes. His voice was deep and rumbled as he spoke. White hair gleamed in the sunlight.  
He told them about Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, “the hottest place on Earth,” and then to training at Camp Edwards in Massachusetts, “the coldest place on Earth.”  
His unit invaded Italy by way of Northern Africa and pushed north through Rome. Then they headed for France. The forests were dense and fraught with peril, the soldier told them. The young man nodded. He recalled.  
“We were lost more than anything,” the soldier said, blue eyes going distant before clearing. He smiled at the other two. “Me and this other guy--what was his name?--me and this guy were looking for some of the others who’d gone off when we came up on this observation point. Germans. At least seven of them.”  
The soldier recalled one of the Germans walking away from the observation post with a wash pan. He and his buddy had been keeping quiet and trying to figure out a way around them without alerting them they were there.  
The younger man sat in rapt attention. The sailor had dozed off. The gliderman had wandered off to talk to someone else.  
The soldier said his buddy, who was much younger, lifted his pistol and took a shot at the pan.  
“We’re at war and he’s thinkin’ about shootin’ the wash pan out of that man’s hands,” the soldier said, ancient annoyance bubbling up into his tone. “Well, he hit it from about 75 yards away. Pan went rollin’ down the hill.”  
The only thing that saved them was that the others from their unit were nearby and helped them take the Germans in the post prisoner.  
“I never saw him after the war,” he said of the trigger-happy younger soldier. “I heard he got killed somewhere along the way.”  
The younger man recalled his best friend taking risky, ill-advised shots at German soldiers usually from high up so that the enemy never saw him. And usually because said Germans were close to their unit’s position or to his friend.  
They would have moved heaven and Earth to help each other. Extreme sadness washed over him followed by a fresh wave of guilt, knowing that while he’d tried, it hadn’t quite been enough.  
“You alright kid?” the soldier asked. The young man nodded. “What’re you doing out here anyway? Look like you’re ready for a jog.”  
“I’ve already been. Jogging, that is,” the young man told him, sitting up straight on the granite bench. “I’m an early riser. Before dawn usually.”  
“Army?” the old soldier asked. He nodded. “Thought so. You had the look about you, son.”  
“Having trouble being home?” The young man nodded again.  
He didn’t want to insult the man by asking if the aching in his heart would ease with time.  
“Did you see them much, the others, after the war,” he asked instead. The older soldier nodded.  
“I did, but it took some time,” he said giving him a level stare. “I didn’t want to go to the reunions at first because it was hard knowing there were some guys who wouldn’t be there. I had 200 in my unit and lost 99 under my command. I felt responsible.  
“But I also felt that I owed it to them to remember them and to live my life.”  
“How do you do that?” the young man asked. “I don’t know what to do with myself some days. I go to work and I do what I’m asked to do but nothing else, sometimes.”  
“One step at a time,” the older man said. “You think I don’t wake up some nights feeling bitter cold and askin’ my wife to shut the window, even though I know the window’s closed. Son, you never forget was an 88 sounds like. Sitting here with you now, I can hear it.  
“But I keep moving. You keep moving, too. One step at a time. Build relationships with people. Do things that make you happy and that make you feel content in yourself.”  
The young man’s mouth quirked up on one side.  
“I was volunteering with Boy Scouts and with the VA until I got to where I couldn’t get around all that great,” the old soldier told him waving a cane. “You got a girl? Or a fella? I don’t judge, son.”  
The young man let out a bark of laughter at that and gave the man a genuine smile.  
“A girl, yes,” he answered, thinking of the curvy, blue-eyed brunette who was no doubt waist deep in data and paperwork at that big, ugly tower in Manhattan for Science!  
“Talk to someone,” the older man told him. “It ain’t gotta be her or any of your friends. They have these veterans counselors now who can help if you need it. My boy saw one when he came back from Vietnam and his boy saw one when he came back from Iraq the last time. No shame in it.”  
“I know that,” the young man responded. “I just wish I knew what I wanted to do.”  
A knotted hand came down on his broad shoulder.  
“You’ll get there,” the old soldier.  
“Dad?” a male voice came from nearby. The young man tracked the voice to an older man standing by the fountain. “Ready to go?”  
The old soldier waved a hand in his direction before standing and balancing on his cane.  
“If you ever need someone to talk to, even if it’s an old man who could be going hard of hearing, you give me a call,” he said as he pressed a card into his hand. “That’s an old card but the number is the same.”  
The young man looked down at the card. He’d been in the floor covering business before he retired.  
He extended a hand to the older man, who took it in his own giving him a firm handshake.  
“I never introduced myself,” he started. “Steve Rogers.”  
The older man chuckled.  
“I know who you are, son,” he said. “I was in Italy when you came over with the USO. I was there when you brought in the POWs from that HYDRA base. I’ve forgotten a lot of things but you and Sgt. Barnes were hard to forget. Kid--” he chuckled darkly. “You two were older than me the last time I saw you. That Barnes looked like he was about to fall over when ya brought them back but he was holdin’ that rifle like he’d put one in anybody who so much as looked at you wrong. You don’t forget that kind of loyalty. I was sorry to hear about him. And you.”  
Steve’s lips flattened to a line as he nodded.  
“Anyway, my boy is callin’,” the soldier told him. “Offer stands. It’s hard at first but worth it to work at it.”  
He watched as the old soldier ambled up to his son. The son spoke to his father briefly before giving Steve a curious glance.  
Steve responded with a small salute and a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time posting here, so sorry about the formatting. I don't know how to fix it. :/ 
> 
>  
> 
> This is dedicated to the men, women and service animals who have served our country both foreign and domestic.  
> The men Steve Rogers meets at the World War II Memorial are characters inspired by three men that I’ve met in my time as a newspaper reporter. I’ve not used their names, but some of their stories are here.  
> Thank a veteran today and every day. 
> 
> "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them." -President John F. Kennedy


End file.
